Liz Greene is perhaps my very favorite astrologer, in that she is very much oriented to the unconscious mind, and has published penetrating books on Saturn (keeper of the gates to the unconscious), plus Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, all denizens of the unconscious that both deepen our intelligence (if we can manage to consciously attune to them) and connect us inexorably with humans everywhere, since we are all being struck by (Uranus), swimming(Neptune) and diving (Pluto) in the same unconscious soup! Think zeitgeist! And how it changes through time, synchronized with the planets of the unconscious as they change signs through time.

Indeed, were it not for the planets of the unconscious mind, I would have not nearly the same interest in the symbolic language of astrology.

Green’s overview of the possible repercussions in and to the United States of Pluto’s passage through Capricorn was written in 2005. It feels remarkably prescient, if perhaps a bit too optimistic. On the other hand, Liz Greene did not predict the rise of Donald J. Trump. Who could have predicted that?

It’s as if he came out of nowhere, to hurl a wrecking ball into long-running deep state plans to obliterate the U.S. as a nation and fold it into the “new world order” centralized state otherwise known as “globalism.”

Instead, Trump talks MAGA “Make America Great Again.” And that’s not just an egocentric boast. He also, in a recent tweet, exhorted France to “make France great again.” The point is, Trump is a nationalist, not a globalist. Period.

BTW: If you have time, you might want to watch this video, a compilation of clips from various Trump interviews from 1980 on. It certainly does appear that he is doing, or damn well attempting to do, exactly what he has been talking about all along. Whether or not his diagnosis of the deplorable state of the U.S. is correct, or attempts to rectify the situation are either meaningful or helpful, especially after watching this video, I’d be surprised if anyone could continue to think he’s an idiot, a fool, and a liar. As a savvy businessman, he has a proven track record. And unlike politicians, despite massive resistance, he’s actually following through, or attempting to follow through, on his promises.

Frankly, given Trump’s deep familiarity with the process (and opportunity) of bankruptcy, I’m grateful that he’s our president during this time. Because you know, in your gut, that this is where the U.S. is headed, has been ever since early 2008, when Pluto entered Capricorn and the big banks nearly all went bust. Perhaps the actual bankruptcy will be kicked off by the upcoming Saturn/Pluto conjunction (January 2020); in any case, Pluto has been opposing the many U.S. planets in Cancer, detonating one after another, ever since 2008. And it’s nowhere near done!

The most significant transit of our lifetimes, and of the — still short, remember, compared to, say China, or India! — lifetime of the U.S.A. itself, will be the first return of Pluto to its own natal place in the U.S. chart. Might we begin to get a taste of our own medicine? Might we begin to recognize the wisdom of growing up and not acting out like a teenage bully?

We are already feeling a foretaste of this transit, as much vaunted hegemonic American power (“hyperpower,” “empire,” “Project for a New American Century,” 800 military bases world-wide) over the planet begins its long, slow, deeply painful decomposition. This process will ramp up to actual detonation during the final years of Pluto’s transit through Capricorn (2021-2024), during which I expect an ongoing dematerialization, one after another, of all the hierarchical structures that have held energy in form since the U.S. was born. This includes central banks dealing in fake fiat money, the reliance on war to keep the economy growing (the U.S. has been at war for all but 14 years of its existence), and the predatory capitalist economic system as a whole. As has been said many times, one cannot continue to infinitely “grow” an extractive economy on a finite planet! And capitalism, by its very nature, requires continuous growth!

If even a semblance of these “United States” survives the Plutonian onslaught of death and rebirth of the material structures that hold energy in form we might finally expect to participate in the emergence of a new reality, one in which the deep state which has been running the U.S. is no longer capable of holding its own people in economic slavery, nor of policing, enslaving, and destroying the rest of the world.

More on both those configurations to come. Meanwhile, I give you Liz Greene’s interpretation, composed in advance, of the long Pluto in Capricorn transit and its possible effects on the U.S. chart.

Remember this video? Perhaps the most iconic eleven seconds on the internet.

Shown below, a 33-minute video that stripped the veils from my eyes. Not that I didn’t realize, at some level, that the U.S. was complicit in whatever went on with Libya, but that the level of perfidy, according to these two Americans who were deeply familiar with Libya, both before, during, and after the carnage, was truly monumental.

After listening to this, still unable to sleep, I googled their names and discovered that there are many much longer videos that detail their story. Which is good, because they tried to cram way too much info into 33 minutes.

And what really strikes me now, is that I had never heard of this couple before! Never! Despite my understanding that the internet has basically siloed all of us into our own little compartmentalized areas of interest, I thought that I would at least know something about major players in areas of interest to me, like the Mideast. Especially, major players that had info about Hillary, which these two decidedly do. Really an eye-opener, giving us a quick, penetrating view into the way the deep state/corporate predatory capitalist bankster military industrial complex operates, around the world.

Also, I had heard vaguely that the U.S. view of Libya and its leader was misleading, but I had absolutely no idea that Quadaffi had built up a country that truly benefitted all of its people! No wonder the Libyans loved their leader, and no wonder the deep state needed to destroy it.

The contrast between Before and After has never been so clear to me. Thank you.

On November 8, 2018, two days past the still contested U.S. election, Jupiter left Scorpio for Sagittarius, where it will remain until December 2, 2019. This shift heralded an alteration in the cultural atmosphere, beginning to lift us out of the slog of deep emotional gunk that has been surfacing during the past year as Jupiter transited through Scorpio. This gunk, residue from the egregious uses of power, what we call “power over” others — sexually, emotionally, economically — has been surfacing from deep below, like a long suppressed volcano. Indeed, one might say that the disgusting, and it turns out, false sexual accusations leveled at Justice Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court hearings climaxed this Jupiter in Scorpio period.

But Scorpio is not done. Check out the inception chart for Jupiter in Sagittarius, where Jupiter is conjunct Moon in late Scorpio, and nearby Sun conjunct the Ascendant, also both in Scorpio.

The inception chart of any planetary ingress sets the stage for the energies activated during the transit of that planet through its new sign.

Notice also, in this chart, that Moon (and more widely, Jupiter) are both square Mars in Aquarius, conjunct the root point of the chart.

I tend to identify Mars in Aquarius here with the fractious, and fracturing, mass mind, the huge splits that have developed within our society that tend to be ideological in nature. As someone put it recently on twitter: For the liberal left, “nationalism” means racism; for the conservative right, “nationalism” means not globalism: and never the twain shall meet!

The square between Scorpio Moon and Aquarian Mars: huge emotional energies infuse ideological splits. It’s as if no one is in his or her “right mind” during this time, but instead overwhelmed with deep painful feelings that unless we consciously process them, tend to make us furiously “act out” mentally against others who “disagree.” What happened to civil discourse? I doubt it will return any time soon.

During this entire Jupiter in Sagittarius period, we are charged with the task of clearing out the sticky emotional Scorpio mess that has besieged us, culturally and personally. And, if we’re not careful, instead of actually doing that, we will instead, unconsciously flip from our pain-filled emotional bodies into our “rational” left brains. In other words, rather than consciously process our own feelings so that they can dissolve, we will instead tend to want to “figure out” what happened, and who’s right, who’s wrong, all based on ideologies that either we make up as we go along, or more likely, absorb from others, which we then utilize in turn as guns, to shoot down any who comes to an “opposite” conclusion!

Which brings me to Jupiter in Sagittarius, the sign Jupiter rules. This position renders Jupiter more powerful in this sign than in any other. Jupiter symbolizes all that is large, and growing; in Sagittarius, that can signify largess, generosity of spirit, openness of intelligence, ever-expanding perspectives, or the increase of rigid, dogmatic points of view, all of which consider themselves to be right, and so everybody else is wrong. Yes, either attitude is possible with Jupiter in Sagittarius, either increased openness or increased bigotry. Which attitude you hold depends on how aware you are of the way your own mind/body/spirit works, and thus, capable of consciously changing the way it works, if needed in order not to put up a wall against others.

In other words, there’s an evolved way of utilizing Jupiter in Sagittarius and there is an unevolved way of working with this placement. As a person with the Sun, Ascendant, and Mars all in Sagittarius, believe me, I know what I’m talking about, as I’ve swung both ways.

I have acted out as the unevolved Sagittarian, several times in my life, both for prolonged periods. The first when I was young, as a saintly Roman Catholic girl, with “God” in my head judging my every move according to rules given me from outside. The theology, the ideology, of Catholicism held me strictly in its cage of oppression; and of course I didn’t know it. I was born into that “faith” tradition, baptized as an infant, mind-controlled to “be-LIE-ve everything the nuns told me in grammar school, scared of sin, and especially frightened for my friends who weren’t Catholic, because, no matter what, they would go to hell!

At some point in my early 20s, this changed. Here’s one story from that time which is relevant, though I don’t know if I can say it was “the cause.”

I was a first year doctoral student in philosophy at Boston University, taking a class on Formal Boolean Logic. All semester long, the teacher kept pointing to formulas: “if we go this way we end up in contradiction;” or “if we go that way we end up in contradiction.” I can no longer remember the train of thinking that led him to these conclusions, but it was obvious to everyone in the class that if we end up in contradiction, it’s bad, very bad.

Something didn’t sit right with me. I didn’t know what it was. But I finally did dare to raise my hand. And when I did, I am reminded now, of what happened when I had earlier dared to raise my hand as a six year old, asking my teacher, in a discussion on arithmetic: “But, but . . . what is a number?” and watching Sister Bernita stare at me, for a long long time, before finally answering: “That is not a question, dear.”

Huh?

And now, as a young woman, I was finding myself asking another, apparently devastatingly unreal question: “But, but . . . what’s wrong with contradiction?” Once again, the teacher, this time a middle-aged professor, stared at me, for a long time, and his face got red and seemed to balloon from inside. Finally, he sputtered: “BECAUSE FROM A CONTRADICTION, ANYTHING FOLLOWS, ANYTHING!”

That’s it! From that moment on, I was freed, not just from the conceptual helmet of Catholicism, but from religiously “following the rules” of logic itself! In time I would learn to acknowledge the “truth” of both sides of any “contradiction,” in the sense that their presence together constitutes a paradox, and as the great physicist Niels Bohr put it: “The opposite of one great truth is another great truth.”

I am reminded of this now, when a dear young friend of mine tells me that his girl friend has just broken up with him. Why? Because, he says she told him, they hold different world-views. I asked him what precipitated the break-up. “We were having a discussion about choices. I said there were times when two alternative paths presented themselves , both equal in that both with negative and positive aspects, and it wasn’t obvious to me which to choose. But I had to choose one or the other.” She said, ‘No that is not correct. Whatever choice you made is the only one you could have made.'”

How amazing, that a couple could break up over such an abstract philosophical discussion! He says the fact that they have different world-views doesn’t matter to him. That all relationships require compromise. She says no, this belief is the most important one in my life, and I cannot compromise it by remaining in relationship with you.

A few weeks before that, she had noticed herself becoming more vulnerable emotionally to him, and considered breaking up with him then. But she caught herself, recognizing that she was scared of her own vulnerability.

This time her powerful belief system won out over her vulnerability.

Is their relationship really over? Who knows. We’ll see. But in any case, this discussion illustrates Jupiter in Sagittarius quite beautifully. The woman, who, by the way, has her Sun in Sagittarius, decided that her (Sagittarian) belief system was so important that it would rule her life. She illustrates a person who is wearing a cemented conceptual helmet. one that dogmatically dictates both thought and behavior.

I told my young friend: “You are both right. This paradox between her view and your view of free will is one philosophers have struggled with for centuries. As if they could — and should — come down on one side or the other! Is there free will, or is there not? From a 3-D point of view, there is free will: in fact, our lives string themselves out as a result of a series of conscious and/or unconscious choices. From a higher dimensional point of view, what we did in fact choose to do feels inevitable, the only choice we could have made.

When we find ourselves able to entertain two sides of any opposition, any contradiction, any choice, feeling and knowing the consequences of each as real and of value; when we find ourselves able to do as Niels Bohr did, recognize that the “opposite” of one great truth is another great truth, then we have opened into a spaciousness larger than any of our choices, any of our perspectives on our choices. We open to infinity. And that, my friends, is what we really fear. The spaciousness that has no end and no beginning, but just IS.

Let me bring this discussion back now, to me, my own evolutionary process. For though I realized, thanks to the huge emotional outburst from my logic teacher, that “contradiction” is used to keep us inside a certain conceptual helmet (in my case, that of the western philosophical tradition) way back in my early 20s, I did not then realize this with every fiber in my being, so that it altered my own behavior. How do I know? Because in my late 30s I became a “peace activist,” carrying the flaming torch of righteousness, nasty to anyone who dared oppose me, or ignore me.

And it was finally, about a year later, after speaking at innumerable public events and pissing off my audiences routinely, that I finally sat down with myself and realized: I had become a violent peace activist! A living contradiction!

From that moment on, I knew that I needed to embrace this ghastly fact about myself, and to work to heal myself so that I would no longer cause the very wars that I was aiming, I thought, to prevent.

So too, here, with this young friend and his now ex-girlfriend. She does not realize that her dogmatic attitude is what’s preventing her from connecting. She doesn’t recognize the contradiction between how she acts and how she thinks. For her overriding principle is that one must “surrender” to the present moment. And yet she has cemented “surrender” into an ideology. Yep! Another living contradiction, worth plumbing for its riches. I hope she finds her way to do so..

And what does this convoluted discussion have to do with Jupiter in Sagittarius? Well, during this period of heightened philosophical/ideological intensity, for that is what it will become during this coming year, we will be asked to “come down on one side or the other” of many disputes as to values, meaning, perspectives, truth, and so on. And we will be encouraged to fight one another over whose truth is the right one. We will be asked to banish any “contradiction” in the way we think.

If we allow ourselves to be convinced by any argument over whose truth is the right one, then we will have fallen into the spell of the unevolved use of Jupiter in Sagittarius. We will end up ideologues, rigid, dogmatic, and judgmental of anyone else who doesn’t “be-LIE-ve” as we do.

On the other hand, if we can learn to deliberately notice contradictions as they arise, and notice how we do tend to want to come down on one side or the other, but then, learn to catch ourselves before doing so; if we can learn to inhabit the space between each of the points that a contradiction or polarity implies, then we can free ourselves, learn to whoosh out into the infinity that holds us all in its embrace, both those who are pro and those who are con, both those with tight conceptual helmets, and those who would rather, like us, shake out our hair and open to the higher understanding that can continue to increase with age.

At 75 years now, I feel grateful to that 30+ self who recognized the contradiction between her thought and behavior as a violent peace activist, and who worked assiduously, for the next seven years to heal that opposition within herself, not by opposing violence, but by recognizing its roots in the need to act rather than just sit passively by as men and women continue to kill each other over whose idea was the right one, communist/socialist or capitalist.

Both ideologies, when taken to extremes, are crazily off, leading to either total selfishness (capitalism) or total abnegation of the self (communism). What is the space between the two poles? How can we open to the virtues of both systems and hold them in dynamic balance without coming down on one side or the other? How can we enlarge our own view of the world to include contractions within it as nodes, growing points leading to further evolutionary development?

During this Jupiter in Sagittarius period, during this one year, can we move from competing narrow dogmatisms to continuously opening space that includes all possible perspectives? That is the question. For when Jupiter then enters Capricorn on December 2, 2019 for its next year-long transit, we may begin to pay attention to the actual material structures we have created that either reflect or negate our widening perspectives during this crucial Jupiter in Sagittarius year.

The contrast could not have been greater. A nearly full house for the Benjamin Britten War Requiem Sunday afternoon vs. the 20 or so folks (including me) who attended the opening session of the 12-hour anti-war film and lecture event on Monday afternoon. Both events to commemorate this year’s Veteran’s Day.

And yes, those 20 people in the second audience were all old folks like me who actually remember the Vietnam War, and the “body counts” every night on T.V., and our anti-war movement inspired by the military draft.

I was, and remain, intensely grateful to Marine Corps combat veteran Tim Bagwell for putting this entire free event on, shelling out his own money, thousands of dollars, as, he says, his gift to Bloomington. Those of us who did attend, by the time five minutes had passed of the first film, Winter Soldier, were squirming in our seats.

Though I knew the Vietnam War was filled with atrocities, I did not realize that this war was shock-full of events made famous by the Mai Lai Massacre.

At the time, this massacre was scapgoated, billed by the MSM as a horrific exception to the rules of engagement of war. NOT! According to the testimony of veterans at this 1972 Winter Garden Investigation panel discussion, it was routine to wipe out villages, raping, torturing, and the killing villagers and burning their “hooches.” Furthermore, their ears were cut off and brought back to camp. Whoever got the most ears earned the most beers. Atrocity was routine.

Media told the story of how she became a peace activist: She was in high school, when her friend’s older brother entered the military. He was excited to go, and they were all excited for him, as a patriotic American going to help save Vietnamese people from Communist takeover.. But, as Medea tells the story, letters home from this young man gradually changed. Something was wrong. He no longer seemed to be the same person. Finally, the day came when an envelope arrived in the mail containing a human ear. “Here,” he told his sister proudly, “a gook’s ear. You can wear it as a necklace.”

Medea happened to be there when the letter was opened. The experience was so shocking that she rushed into the bathroom and vomited. “And that’s when I became a peace activist” she concluded, without further comment.

The horror that Medea felt is echoed, of course only second hand, at one remove, in the movie Winter Soldier. After the first five minutes, I kept wanting to leave. My body and mind and spirit just did not want to subject myself to tale after tale of atrocities committed by young American men who, clear-eyed, apologetic, and no doubt still waking up with nightmares, said that, in order to participate in the war, they were trained to descend to the level of animal, just as they saw the Vietnamese themselves as animals, not human, so killing them was no big deal.

As I sat there, squirming, I reflected on the extreme difference between appreciating the intense horror of war refracted into “art” — for example, the Benjamin Britten concert — and the visceral horror of war close up and personal — even though still at one remove. This was an old film about U.S. atrocities in Vietnam. Where are the same films about U.S. atrocities in the Middle East, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and who knows where else on and round our 800 overseas military bases during the decades that followed and still ongoing?

And I think about the veterans assembled there, in 1972; still very young men. Who are they now, and where are they? Homeless and alcoholic? Opioid addicted? Or are they just dead of broken hearts.

Once again, hats off to Tim Bagwell, who spells out his own PTSD for which, he says, both diagnosis and treatment were first received in Bloomington. Thus his gift, back to his adopted community.

In the morning session, during Q & A, I raised my hand and told about the three years, back in the early ’80s, when I committed to being a tax resister, writing a letter each year to the IRS to say why I was not going to pay taxes.

Since I was living largely below money anyway, my resistance was not a big deal, unless I began to enter the culture and the lifestream of money more fully.

I will never forget a walk I took with myself one spring day, the walk when I decided to NOT be a tax resister, but to pay my taxes, even though I knew full well that this would mean at least 50% of my hard-earned money would go to the military. I made this choice because I realized that to continue as a tax resister would mean either not ever entering the culture, or jail. Those were my choices. Were these choices authentically part of my own life path?

As I made the decision to stop resisting, I was highly aware of the contradiction this set up within myself. And ever since then, this contradiction has been the foundation for empathy with others (all of us, or most of us) who find ourselves, even though we might be well aware of the consequences of our choices, participating in the ignominy of the American Military Industrial Complex, which is threaded through literally every aspect of our society.

How many of us would it take, I asked the 20 people present — rhetorically? — to begin a massive tax resistance movement? 30%?

By the time Medea Benjamin took the stage, a woman who has given her life to stopping the war machine, there were I guess 80 people in the audience, all but one of my generation. Slightly better than the morning, but nowhere near the 3000 present at the enormous musical event the afternoon before.

As Tim Bagwell put it, up on the stage, it’s just too difficult for people to contemplate the fact that the U.S. is in the business of murdering people world-wide, and pretending otherwise, or covering it with bullshit about “making the world safe for democracy.”

My own anti-war actions are mostly confined to sharing what I find about the MIC here on this bog. And to speaking up in public, and with my friends and family. At this point in my long life, however, I would be willing to go to jail, if necessary, in order to help begin a tax resistance movement.

. . . and 100 orchestral members, plus conductor and three soloists, delivered a magnificent musical expression on the 100th anniversary of World War I. Written in 1961 just as the Vietnam War was ramping up, and played only very seldom, due to the enormous resources it commands, this was an afternoon I will forever remember.

I had sent a message this morning to our fb private Green Acres Village group, asking if someone wanted to go with me to this afternoon’s concert, and was not surprised when Andreas, pianist extraordinaire, and it turns out, teacher of the extraordinarily expressive soprano soloist in today’s concert, agreed to go.

As we walked to the event, on the IU campus about a mile away, we talked about the human propensity for violence leading to war. I told him about the amazing fb encounter with the man I thought was a real life friend and who (“seriously”!, he claimed) threatened to kill me for my political views. In response, Andreas told me about the book he is reading, Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed, and said I might like to borrow it when he’s done, since it contemplates the effects of extremist ideologies upon the human being. I agreed, it’s time for me to read this book again.

Then we talked about human creativity, how even the most devious people are exhibiting creativity in their very deviousness! Why not turn that deviousness to good?

He and I were able to score front row seats in the second balcony. The place was packed, which surprised those who put on this performance, thinking it would not draw that many people. The capacity of this auditorium is 3154 seats. I imagine the crowd drew near to 3000.

I wonder: is this Veterans Day, this Armistice Day, this Remembrance Day different than others? On this 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, is the world really waking up to the complex horrific tragedy (and racket) of war?

According to what I read, the Deep State has been trying to ignite World War III for several years now, and what’s keeping it at bay is the alliance between Putin and Trump. I wonder if that’s true. See today’s other post: 11.11: THUMB UP!

“My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is pity.
All a poet can do is to warn.”

— Wilfred Owen, a World War I soldier and poet, who died

shortly before the Armistice.

War Requiem, Op. 66: Words from the Missa pro Defunctis and the poems of Wilfred Owen.

I’ll leave it to you to go find the lyrics to this Requiem for War, to War, about War. The words are beautiful, and fully as anguished as the music itself, all the human and instrumental voices exquisitely, haltingly, screechingly, murmuringly expressive of the longing, fear, terror, love, horror, and ultimately, not exactly peace, but a meeting of two soldiers, from either side, both of whom are dead.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

I knew you in this dark; for so you frowned

yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed.

I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Let us sleep now.

While listening to this magnificent tribute to the human capacity for endless destruction and resurrection, I marveled at how an orchestra is the perfect template of how humans can not just learn to get along, but to pull together gloriously, each one expressing his own skill and talent while attuning fully with others towards a common goal, a common feeling, a common meaning.

The words of Nietszche were never more appropriate:

‘WE HAVE ART IN ORDER NOT TO DIE OF THE TRUTH.”

The 11.11 2018 date was first promoted as the day when the U.S. would hold a military parade. Then that was cancelled, or postponed, in favor of Trump going to Paris for this 100th celebration of the end of World War I. Then, Q started to promote 11.11 as when much would be resolved, and Putin and Trump would meet again.

P.S. When I googled “Trump and Putin talk in Paris” I got a bunch of contradictory notices. Methinks the two of them are trolling the world. AGAIN. Perhaps they don’t have to talk — in public, that is. They can just shake hands and smile. And . . . Putin’s quick, decisive thumb up gesture was huge, blatant. YES!

Here’s a photo of Macron and Merkel with Trump, as Putin approached. Who looks happy?

I.e., NOT A GLOBALIST! This is the common ground upon which Putin and Trump stand: both appear determined to guarantee their own country’s national sovereignty.

I have been dancing in this sacred, joyful, heartfelt tradition with others for at least 20 years, first in the mountains of Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Utah, and now in the heartland of Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin.